This is bound to be a long post, and all over the place.
My tablet is about to die. I don't really want to go buy yet another one, I am starting to hate the idea of consuming more handhelds because the programmed obsolescence reaches it's time. I already have a chromebook (not something I am particularly proud of, if I buy anything I hope I can still find that cheap lenovo netbook), which I can continue to use to do everything that I already do on my tablet.... well almost everything. In fact, I didn't use the tablet for anything but reading at all. Of course, reading accounts for 95% of my computer use. On the other hand, though, I was starting to get tired of so much reading too! And it was starting to prove ineffective for me to read so much and put nothing to practice. In fact, I had already spent a lot of energy reading about computer stuff, without ever doing anything with computers anymore, to the point that I had already abandoned every reading related to computers and programming, and I was looking in other, more naturalistic, directions. But even then, I thought it quite silly that I would be at the mercy of a piece of silicon for learning about the real world.
I think the devices I use end up defining the way I use them. It makes sense, what is natural for a device is how I use it. And the tablet had long proved to provide a very limited environment. That is actually the main reason I ended up doing nothing but reading on it, it was the only thing that made sense for me to do in there! Of course, after so much time doing the same thing, I got so used to that one way of doing things that I stopped being able to conceive any other workflow at all. Now that I have a laptop of sorts, I don't know what to do at all with it, but read! Actually, at some point I was very much into notekeeping, but the tablet was so awfully deficient for this that I abandoned the idea altogether. Now I have a computer, so it would make sense for me to take back that interest, would it not?
In fact, there are a lot of things that I've wanted to do but never had the adequate environment to do them, one of them being writing computer graphics. But now that I am able to do all of them, I am paralyzed. I feel not at all confident that I could do any of them at all. I feel overloaded at all the new information that I have to take in to even start, that I get overwhelmed just thinking how I might go about starting any of this. I am lacking confidence with my confidence to harness technology.
I think it's part of getting old, and maybe that's why older generations can't understand newer technologies: We get used to the old stuff, to our old muscle memories, that everything that is new feels like it shouldn't be this way, that the old way was better. I realize there is so much about the new technologies that really does suck, a process they have come to call "enshittification", and I agree with most of it, especially regarding the web. But I think there is more than that, and we just get so used to certain ways of understanding and using technologies that we find it very difficult to accomodate to the changing environments the way a fresh user might quickly "get" it. That is likely why newer generations are so swift to learn the new technologies and older ones find them extremely painful.
But besides that, I also think I am letting my brain become old by not having the plasticity to accomodate to these new ways of doing things. Furthermore, I think I am becoming old in lacking the confidence that I had as a teen for creating stuff with it. I suspect that most of the memes, the videos, all that fun silly stuff we find on the internet comes from the younger people. I remember the flow of creativity I would get when I was a teen and first learned to do many things on here. Now I just get kind of stuck, trying to figure out something worthwhile to do and how to do it. Perhaps I set my standards too high, or place too much weight on theory and documentation, or maybe I am just intimidated by the new interfaces; either way, the end result is simply that I do not dare take a first step and make a few tentative attempts the way I would as a teen, when I would spen hours making stuff and learning by trial and error, and finally producing some crappy little videogame, some image, or a silly little website. I also get worked up on the technologies I use for making this stuff, such as the text editors and programming languages, that I forget to actually mind the thing I want to do, for being too nitpicky about the tools I do it with.
Anyway, now that I have been forced to change the environment in which I conduct my studies, and my screen time in general, it would be best to take this opportunity to renew myself, the way I use computers, the way I do what I like to do, and to take the chance to actually get started doing so many things that I always wanted to do but didn't have quite the proper environment to try them. My brain still resists the prospective difficulty of undertaking these enterprises, for which I need a change of attitude in how I approach these things. Sounds like a tall order, and yet I need to remind myself that the thing to do is to dive right in, like I did when I was a teenager, and start doing all these things without caring too much whether I am doing them "right", especially when "right" just means some purist ideas that I have adopted from strangers on the internet, on sites that I am doing my best to avoid altogether anyway!
I am reminded of all the possibility that is behind these strange little devices, and also of how this possibility has been largely truncated by the already mentioned "enshittification" and ever growing behemoth technologies that, in trying to be everything to everyone, leave users with a perplexing sprawl of complexity that constrains their use to a certain way of doing things and every deviation from that standard becomes a costly investment in education, such education, need be said, on ever changing pieces of software that may be completely overhauled within the next 5 years.
There is plenty of work ahead, but also fun, and I think I best approach it like such, because in the end I am not getting paid to do any of these, so why stress as if I was?
Up next: a life of unadventure, mystery scholarship, and a single book for a lifetime.